WEDNESDAY, 17th of JULY, 2013
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| Trumpets Of Jericho In Galway (unknown year) Just a few weeks ago we were hit with the very sad news that Trumpets Of Jericho had disbanded (they were scheduled to play The Moot Art Music Night on July 12th). Peter Lawlor lays down some clay and petals in reflection to a much loved and loving band of lads. |
I don’t listen to a lot of bands anymore.
I’m not entirely sure why this is. It’s partly due to my stubborn opinion of
what a band should do to garner my attention, and also due to dance music/ electronic
music taking over my ears in recent years. I find it really difficult to get
excited about bands, in particular Irish bands. A lot of their music comes
across as an exercise in what is cool, or perceived to be cool by the Irish
public.
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| Trumpets Of Jericho Poster (2010) |
For example, the first time I saw Adebisi
Shank in a modestly attended Cleere’s Theatre when they had just brought out
their first EP is one of the few times in recent memory where a band completely
blew me away. I had no expectations but they sounded like nothing I heard
before and to experience live when Lar’s guitar nearly knocks you out numerous
times is a thing of wonder. Since then everyone and their granny was starting
an instrumental “math-rock”(genre names are silly, that’s one of the silliest)
band. And as a result the whole thing got tired and boring very quickly. (Not
Adebisi Shank though, they’re still consistently brilliant)
Trumpets of Jericho were a band. They were
a really good band. I was lucky enough to see them progress from a band who
were experimenting in their early gigs to try and find what type of band they
were, to a band full of confidence who knew exactly who they were. They
genuinely got better every time I saw them play live. The band is made up of
close friends of mine, so to a certain degree I might be showing some bias. I
don’t really care though. They were brilliant and I was committed to telling
everyone how good they were, and now I’m going to tell you.
There was no fear of ToJ being accused of
trying to be cool, or part of any scene that was seen as cool. Just look at ANY
of their self-made videos promoting gigs, or their quite brilliant tour diary
series. They made music that didn’t sound like anyone else on the Island, which
is a complete and utter rarity. This is probably the main reason why they
appealed to me. You can point to a litany of influences, but they digested
these influences and regurgitated them out onto the listener in a way that was
was something quite unique and endearing. Tom’s lyrics are distinctly Irish and
how he sung them was distinctly Irish, or Corkonian. He sang about Ireland, and
everything thing that was wrong with it. They were angry, but the type of anger
that would end in a kiss rather than a clenched fist.
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| toilets (unknown year) |
So if they were this good why don’t more
people know about them, why didn’t more blogs write about them and why didn’t
more bookers book them, not just here in Ireland but further afield? Well these
are questions that I’ve always asked myself, and questions that I find more
salient now as ToJ are no more. Simply more people didn’t know about them
because of their lack of online presence, which seems to be nearly as important
as having good tunes, which they had in abundance. It could be that they were
in the wrong country/county. It’s a simple fact that the majority of the bands
popular in Ireland today are from/based in Dublin. That doesn’t mean that the
best bands are in Dublin, but it does mean that a lot of bands/artists feel
pressure to have a strong presence in the capital. For whatever reason ToJ were
not nearly as popular as they should have been, and now they’re broken up.
People should care, but they won’t. The world will keep turning, The Corona’s
will still sell out the o2, Halves will still make music where how they
recorded it is more interesting to how it sounds, ASIWYFA will still be the
least subtle/imaginative post-rock –by-numbers band around. But, they will ALL
still be more popular and more appreciated than Trumpets of Jericho ever will
be, which is just pathetic. But who am I to say what’s pathetic? By ToJ
standards this article and myself are one big mass of pathetic.
“Can’t take much more of this
Vicarious nostalgic.
Pining for sweeter days,
It’s not romantic.
It’s just pathetic.”
Well call me pathetic but soon enough I’m going
to be pining for the days when one of the best bands this country has produced
in recent were not left to be an unfairly small footnote on the Irish music
scene.
Peter Lawlor 17/7/13
video by HOB JUNKER
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